Technology for Shipbuilding Affordability

The U.S. Navy is in need of a means for high data rate (HDR) line-of-sight (LOS) communications between ships, submarines, andshore sites. The total point-to-point intra-battlegroupterrestrial data capacity currently available is less than 268kbps per ship. This capacity was marginally adequate severalyears ago, but the increase in traffic load offered by availablegovernment off-the-shelf (GOTS) and commercial off-the-shelf(COTS) systems have resulted in requirements for high data rate,spectrally efficiency, wireless mobile networks. The HDR LOSwaveform concentrates users onto terrestrial burst rates to 1.536Mbps operating on 600 kHz of bandwidth - an increase in the totalterrestrial capacity offered on a ship by a factor of 5.7 per SDRinstallation in about 25% of the bandwidth that is currentlyconsumed by all terrestrial communications assets. Moreover, byestablishing a wireless network for a battlegroup, user access isgreatly simplified and the timeliness / diversity of applicationsexecuted on the ship is substantially enhanced. The Navy is inthe process of procuring a software defined radio (SDR), namedthe Digital Modular Radio (DMR). The result of this project is torealize ubiquitous connectivity through integration of the HDRLOS waveform into DMR or a similar SDR.